Canada CRTC Rules Against Usage Based Billing 117
iONiUM writes "In a somewhat surprising end to the ongoing fight between large ISPs (a duopoly in Canada), and independent ISPs, the CRTC has ruled in favor of the small ISPs. This means that independent ISPs can continue to have unlimited plans offered to customers. From the article: 'Under the CRTC’s new capacity-based approach, large telephone and cable companies will sell wholesale bandwidth to independent ISPs on a monthly basis. Independent ISPs will have to determine in advance the amount they need to serve their retail customers and then manage network capacity until they are able to purchase more. Alternatively, large companies can continue to charge independent ISPs a flat monthly fee for wholesale access, regardless of how much bandwidth their customers use. Both billing options give independent ISPs the ability to design service plans and charge their own customers as they see fit.' Score one for the citizens."
Usage based billing is efficient (Score:5, Interesting)
Usage-based billing with variable pricing is actually the most efficient way to charge for a limited resource. Under the "all you can eat" flat rate model, the most economical amount of capacity is not where there is no network saturation ever, but where the cost to your users of the inconvenience of network saturation equals the cost of adding capacity. That means a little network congestion is actually a good thing in this pricing model.
Under the "usage-based billing with variable pricing" model, there are neither heavy periods nor light periods, but expensive periods and inexpensive periods. It gives people the freedom and ability to economize by scheduling their heavy downloads for the cheap periods to save money.
If something is in less demand during certain times of the day, why shouldn't the seller charge less during those times? This is why restaurants offer lunch and happy hour specials.
Aren't freedom and the ability to economize good things?
Canadian broadband is still crap (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, score a small point for not letting Bell and Rogers increase the abuse, but our wired broadband status quo is still terrible. High prices, low monthly caps (60GB typical) with massive overage fees, absurd asymmetry between D/L and U/L rates (10 Mbps down / 0.5 Mbps up typical), unmitigated throttling any time the provider feels like it (apparently 65-85% of the time [nytimes.com]), 'unintentional' throttling of gaming, etc. Aside from the low caps, you can't even get around any of this by going with one of the smaller ISPs since AFAIK the leased lines are subject to the same 'traffic management' policies.
The service is pretty shitty also - video buffering on a 25Mbps D/L connection, ping to the west coast randomly spiking up to 400ms, problems that 5 calls to tech support over the period of a month and one modem replacement failed to resolve. The tech support guys and technicians all but admit that it's a policy issue rather than anything they can fix.